If you walk into Basta expecting a basic New York-style pizzeria, you’re in for quite the culinary shock. “People are still figuring out what we are,” says Leah DiSisto, one of Basta’s two owners. “They want to know where the shredded cheese is!”

Basta does have pizza, with fresh dough made in small quantities daily. And the toppings are higher-end — instead of pepperoni they’ll use house-cured soppressata. Instead of shredded cheese, they’ll use their own fresh mozzarella.

The small space hasn’t changed drastically from its days as Vinny’s Pizzeria, which occupied the space for 25 years, but one glance at the menu — or into the restaurant’s small kitchen, where sausages hang curing, old-world Italian style — and it’s clear that Basta’s cuisine is a serious upgrade.

Fresh pastas include ravioli with aged Parmesan and ricotta or seasonal fillings like arugula or broccoli rabe. Caponata, a Sicilian dish with a touch of Arab influence, combines eggplant, vegetables, peppers, onions, capers and raisins to create a sensation known in Italian as “agra dolce” — sweet and sour. Corzetti, round flat pasta, is embossed with a handmade wooden stamp that DiSisto and Mason commissioned from an artisan in Italy. It features their chicken logo. For their pizza sauce, they use San Marzano tomatoes from the Mount Vesuvius region in Italy. The pizza dough uses imported double zero flour, also from Italy.

The partners — in love and in work — know which farms their ingredients come from, and they’ve actually grown (and raised!) many of their ingredients themselves. For their house-jarred pasta sauce, they use tomatoes and hot peppers and basil from Cortlandt Farms and Meadows Farm in Yorktown. At Mason’s mother’s home upstate, they’ve built a greenhouse and a chicken coop. Over the summer, they grew tomatoes upstate and on their roofs in Westchester. There are even a few small plants at the restaurant.

DiSisto is a native of Ossining — her father owns the lawnmower service business next door. She met Mason, who is from Port Jervis, at the Italian Culinary Academy in Manhattan, though both had previously attended the Culinary Institute of America.

They studied in Italy, where they learned the Old World arts of cooking and presentation, and refined their expertise on fresh ingredients. Mason then spent years amassing a collection of restaurant equipment with the hopes of someday opening a place of his own, a dream shared by DiSisto. That opportunity came for them last February when the owner of Vinny’s Pizzeria decided to sell. Basta opened August 13th.

Both partners take the lessons they learned in Italy very seriously. “We don’t want to do volume,” says Mason. “We want to do quality.”